softspoken
by vivafiction
Summary: one day, she will ask him if he heard all of the tales she spun while he slept beside her -— katara & zuko. s3, sozin's comet.


**title** — softspoken  
**pairing** — katara & zuko  
**warnings** — none  
**etc** — i saved my rambles for the end

…

The phenomenal afterglow of the comet is only a series of odd weather occurrences, even odd to a child of the ocean who lives in snow all year round. The sky is beautiful, going on three days of a frozen almost-sunset spilling across the horizon in bloody reds and fiery orange and soft, pastel pinks, and the entire sky looks like an ocean of color reminiscent of the setting sun.

Katara remarks quietly about it all, whenever she sees flutters of movement behind eyelids that shutter pale gold eyes, remarks about how the sky is the color of a brilliant fire and it rains in torrential fleets every other hour.

"It's warm," she says with a worn smile, "the air is cool and the rain is warm, and I've never felt anything like that before." She pauses thoughtfully, rail-thin fingers pressed against his forehead, freezing droplets of moisture out of the air to press against his feverish head. His skin is clammy to her touch, damp ringlets of his hair brushing against her knuckles, and Katara counts the days until she breaks down, curls up beside Zuko's empty hearth of a skeleton and prays for mercy.

He had been _fine_, even if his smile threatened to tear at the edges and drip blood, even if the air hitched in his chest every so often, because he'd rasped out his gratitude over and over until Katara had repeated words she hadn't realized she'd stolen.

Two, now, she reminded herself. Two boys whom had saved her, whom she had failed in saving. "I think I'm the one who should be thanking you," she had said, the same way Jet had told her that _he_ should be the one thanking _her_, and she'd watched the life in his eyes crush under rocks.

Zuko had been fine, until he wasn't.

He had sprawled his body out against the bed, where she sat at his side and smiled down at him and tears burned in her eyes like cold, blue fire, and, "I'm just glad you're all right," was what he said before he closed his eyes.

And that had been three days ago. Katara only tells the stories to stave off the silence of her guilt. She should have known that a sleeping injury is only slivers away from death, but as long as Zuko's chest rises and falls, she will sit here; Yue forbid that her friends arrive and forcibly pry her away.

Their friends are on their way into the heart of the capital, she's sure of that. But Appa is with them, and the air is a dangerous place to travel with all of this strangely inclement weather, and Katara hasn't even had the chance to worry about them. Her brother is out there, her little rock-child friend, the closest thing to a sister she has, her one and only hope. Aang, her heart clenches for a moment, because she has no room to worry about all of them when Zuko's pulse drums under her hands, and he can still be saved.

The day curls into night and Katara curls into his side, fingers tapping against the base of his scar, where ruinous skin melts into unmarred, supple flesh. She sings all of the lullabies she remembers Gran Gran singing in that weary, old voice of hers, when Katara hadn't realized how terrible her grandmother's singing was, simply because there was something like love in her words that made them so much sweeter.

Katara was sure she loved Zuko, in some way that made a lullaby appropriate, although the depths and limits to her love were still things she was unsure of.

She stares at his scar and makes stories of the flames that welded it to his cheekbones; she doesn't know much about anatomy, but she knows he can't feel her fingers there in the ridges of scar tissue. She still allows her touch to turn cold, soothing against the sweat that drips down from his temples and slides into his hairline. She wonders how he got so close to a fire, because watching him fight Azula had been a phenomenon all its own, the peace that settled into his bones, the fluid movements of his kata as he shifted around the white-blue flames.

He was a beautiful, powerful bender.

She doesn't wonder long about the scar. Instead, she returns to stories about water pixies with sharp teeth and little children who befriend them, a story she fabricates about the origins of the first living flame, stories that turn into memories of snow in the tundra and climbing across glaciers. She even starts to tell him the story of how she and Aang met, how she _found_ him, as she stretches yawns across the silence.

When she wakes up, the sky is blue and red and purple in the fringes in the middle, and she is alone in the bed with servants bustling around. They sweep while they talk about how the rain has finally let up, how the air is full of suffocating moisture again, how they can _finally_ get on to repairing the Coronation Plaza.

She sits up, half-crazed with wild hair sticking up from her head in a halo of curls, because she'd dismissed all the servants but one, a timid boy who looked too close to her own age. But these are women, picking up clothes from the floor, tidying the room.

"Excuse me," her voice is hoarse from stories, but the door creaks open and she turns to lay into this new servant, because there are too many and they're closing in around her, and it's not what she thinks it is.

It's Zuko, with a bamboo stalk—a crutch underneath his arm and his legs are wobbly and his hair is wet, dripping down onto red silk, and Katara slides to the floor, crying loudly like a child.

He stares at her like she really has been wreathed in insanity, and something aches in his side, watching her break down like this (because Katara has been at his side, waiting, and he didn't even have the decency to wait for her to be awake when he awoke.)

"I'm fine," he says, his voice impossibly quiet because this is what he should say, and he kneels down in front of her, threading his fingers weakly through her hair. He lets the bamboo crutch clatter beside him, ignores the squawk of someone who apparently has lost their footing because of him, and he closes his other hand across her shoulders, pulling her into his embrace. "I am, this time, Katara."

She curls into his chest and cries, a mixture of things; Zuko doesn't understand as she talks about her grandmother, about Toph and children who bleed from pixie bites and forest fires that burn across flesh, about how beautiful the Fire Nation is when it is drowned by warm rain, and she sounds raving mad, but he's just happy to hear her at all.

"I love you," she sighs relief into his neck, because she would have waited _forever_ to see those startlingly sunlight yellow eyes, and _that_ explains the depths of her love for him, _that_ is what tells her it is real. She would have waited forever to see him well again.

Katara has stayed in the same place for three days, four, now, and she doesn't want to ask what will come next; she will just wait for the hysteria to wash off, and figure out where they go from there, when it is time to move on from this place. There are things they will have to talk about, after all.

…

**notes **— so, this idea started out as just wanting to know what the weather was like following sozin's comet. how it evolved into this, i can only blame **anorable** on tumblr, because i was trying to come up with a scar story and this came out. some parts in this are for my wife-senpai, **shannon**, and the rest is gross fabrication from my own feverish delusions.


End file.
